The new Dove campaign is powerful and something to be applauded – an advertising campaign specifically targeted at suggesting women are beautiful as they are. I love the add. For many years I have so hated my own size and body shape. And many women, no matter their spiritual outlook, have wrestled for much of their life with this question of am I too fat or too thin? I laugh every time I see the Jenny Craig commercial with Kirsty Alley and I wonder if I too should be on a diet. Do I need to diet? What about healthier eating? What does my heart really ask for by wanting to be thinner, or more shapely? And where does the question really come from?
Obviously this is a subject that is being discussed at great length these days. And depending on the culture you dwell in, your perspective will be different.
I picked up a book my friend was reading that was written in 1989. It is called Trusting Ourselves (The Sourcebook on Psychology for Women), and while it is 17 years old, the following article on weight has merit.
"How have contemporary American women become so obsessed with controlling their weight? Current efforts to “make women smaller” may be a backlash against the women’s movement. Some theorists have even suggested that the mass semi-starvation of women is the modern equivalent of ‘foot-binding, lip-stretching, and other forms of female mutilation’.
But body size and shape are not altered as easily as hemlines. Asking women to adjust, rearrange, and accommodate to a new standard of attractiveness every decade or so ties up energy and time that could go elsewhere.
The fear of fat robs women of self-esteem and pride, keeps them preoccupied with their appearance, and, perhaps most disturbingly, keeps them from taking up ‘too much space in the world. It is OK for a man to be big. A man has to actually be fat to suffer from fatness. A woman only has to be a woman." Pg 369
Yet reading this through several times today I have realized this is connected more deeply to hierarchical and patriarchal thinking that has deeply scarred men and women – the need to control others in order to gain power over them.
The Dove campaign came after the mostly male executive were shown interviews with their own daughters who really hated how they looked and suffered from low self-esteem. Only then could they be sold on the fact that this campaign was essential.
How much have we women been told, or silently heard loud and clear, that our weight or body shape was not desirable to men. I am sure there are men on the other side who have felt they were not desirable to women either – I am not ignoring that side of the equation. But what I really see here is that the message to be thin and attractive is not about being who you are but about trying to become someone that will attractive to the opposite sex. Then how your life can be molded by them or for them. And the message is just as clear in the church as out of it!
For me this issue of weight has many facets to it but one of them is that it is definitely tied to the gender issue, of controlling how we are to look or act, instead of learning to love ourselves as Jesus specifically asked us to and become those who love our neighbour because of that.
I would love to hear what others think of this thought.